One of those intermittent social media posts celebrating a record’s anniversary caught my eye this week. According to the superior Californian music site, midtempo.co, it is 40 years since the release of Sade’s exquisite debut, Diamond Life. These spurious album birthdays usually pass me by, but there is still something so unhurried and undercelebrated about Diamond Life, I felt compelled to post my own little tribute.
In an instant I was reminded of being 12 years old, growing up in suburban Manchester, hearing a highly stylised invocation of London, translated through the eyes of an unforgettable young star. Sade emerged with a whole world intact. My first thoughts were the ludicrousness of wondering what the inside of The Wag Club looked like at that age. Then something a little more life-changing. Diamond Life is the noise that percolates through my muscle memory every time I get off the 55 bus and wander into Soho. It is the record that sold London to me.
After the Monopoly board and before Diamond Life, London was the Kray Twins, Carnaby Street and King’s Road, Arthur Daley, The Long Good Friday, Twiggy, Widows, punk and Mod. Sade reimagined all that in one suite of songs, peopling her record with a cast list of irresistible smooth operators and soulboys, opening up the nightlife with her immaculate observational gaze. She handed the working class capital over to fashion, coinciding with the birth of London’s emerging style demotic, a cleverly DIY antidote to Paris and Milan.
Over the course of the record, she builds to a cooling, climactic call for racial unity on her faultless cover of Timmy Thomas’s Why Can’t We Live Together? making the personal universal. Diamond Life landed hard, turning the UK temporarily upside down in my head.
Part of what makes Diamond Life a perfect London reset album is the magnificence of Sade Adu herself. She had appeared on the cover of i-D and The Face, magazines that sat well-thumbed in the bedroom I shared with my big brother, iconic imagery that’s been referenced since, pictures that will sit on art director’s mood boards in perpetuity. On release, it sold an astonishing 10 million copies, testament to the scintillating union of outward appearance with innate interior talent it housed.
Nothing says Wardour Street, 1984, with quite the precise clarity of Diamond Life. Its mood is Soho
The perfect London record should evoke a specific time and place. Nothing says Wardour Street, 1984, with quite the precise clarity of Diamond Life. Its mood is as momentously of Soho as that other London classic, Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, albeit with fewer amyl-scented sex dwarves. It would be another five years until Soul II Soul’s Club Classic Vol.One reverberated London nightlife with the same significance, this time shifting from the peripheries, tipping a cigarette into a marble ashtray from a velvet banquette at a jazzy Soho hangout into the heart of the dancefloor.
What makes a perfect London record? Sometimes it’s just stating the obvious, getting the bold type messaging of the city in song, something The Clash particularly excelled at. My personal London classics excavate deeper into the heart of it, date-stamping specifics. Bjork’s Debut nailed the optimistic/futuristic Soho mood of the Milk Bar, Riki Tik and Cuts hairdressers. I can’t hear the opening bars of The Young Disciples’ Road To Freedom without thinking of a blistering summer ’91, listening to Kiss FM in a striped cardigan and white jeans bought from The Duffer of St George to wear standing in line at Subterania. A time when going home at 3am was lightweight behaviour.
Goldie’s Metalheadz is the aural memento of the birth of Hoxton Square, of big turn-ups and girls in early McQueen. Diamond Life is the fairy godmother of these fêted London classics, later of MJ Cole’s Sincere, Dizzee Rascal’s Boy In Da Corner, M.I.A.’s Arular and Kala, even Lily Allen’s Alright, Still. It sits above them with stillness, a quiet conviction, an unusual horizontal power.
Diamond Life’s 40th anniversary took me by surprise only because it lives on with intermittent renaissances. Drake sampled the same Timmy Thomas song on Hotline Bling, acknowledging Sade’s immaculate version. Sade T-shirts dropped at the eternal teenage hangout, Supreme, keeping her Soho patronage alive.
Rumours of a new Sade record surface every six months or so, each time more frenzied than the last. With Diamond Life, she ensured her position as one of London’s patron saints elect. In 40 years, that legend remains undiminished.
